Yundish: Tasty Yunnan-Style Cuisine in Da’an

January 2, 2020 Taipei Expat

One of the most amazing things about Chinese food is just how incredibly varied it is. It’s easy to forget how geographically and culturally diverse China is, which allows it to have the most incredible food, some of which is completely different from what you would find on the other side of the country. A great example of this is Yunnan cuisine, which features an incredible blend of flavours due to its borders with Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar, not to mention the influence of over 25 different ethnic minority groups. Yunnan cuisine may not be very well-known to foreigners, but it’s very much worth trying, especially if you like Vietnamese food. One place you can do so is a restaurant we visited recently called Yundish, which has two branches: one near Zhongxiao Fuxing, and one near Sun-Yat-Sen. We went to the one near Zhongxio Fuxing and found it to be clean and modern, with some Yunnan influences in the decoration.

The first thing we ordered was a side dish, the wood ear mushrooms ($80). The sauce was sweet and a little sour from the rice vinegar and the mushrooms were nice and soft. The texture can be a love-it-or-hate-it sorta thing, but we love them. We’d say this dish was tasty but relatively basic — nothing about them especially screamed Yunnan to us, so if you’re specifically looking to try something new, you may want to skip this.

Next, we got the green papaya salad ($70). This was really nice: sweet, sour, and a little spicy, though again, it didn’t particularly stand out as something new and exciting. It was still delicious, though.

After that, we tried the Yunnan green bean jelly salad ($80). We’re huge fans of this kind of spicy jelly dish in general, and order it every chance we get. Once again, the texture can be off-putting to some, as it’s soft, bouncy, and slippery, but we love it. We’ve probably had better spicy jelly, but we felt the sweet, sour, ever so slightly spicy sauce and the peanuts went nicely together.

Done with the side dishes, we ordered some A May soup noodles with shaozi ($150). This was awesome — the soup was light, but still packed some flavour due to the pork inside, which was extremely soft and tender. The pickled vegetables made things interesting and added a sourness that mixed up the flavours a bit. It was nice to have a hot dish too, and we found this to be nice and warming on a cold night.

One of our very favourite dishes was the Yi cold noodle salad with chicken ($180). We’d actually ordered this before from UberEats, and this was why we visited Yundish in the first place. If you like cold noodles that are a little sweet and spicy, this is a great choice — the freshness and crunch from the veggies and coriander paired very nicely with the delicate noodles, and the chicken was soft and fragrant. We would definitely order this again.

We also tried the original Yi cold noodle salad ($120), which didn’t have any chicken. This was also delicious, but we preferred the version with the chicken, as it added another dimension to the noodles.

Another favourite was the stewed beef noodle with Yunnan shaozi ($170). Our table was divided on whether we liked these or the cold noodles best, as they were relatively similar. These were a little less sweet and a bit heartier due to the big chunks of beef, but there wasn’t a huge difference between them. If you prefer sweeter dishes, we’d recommend the cold noodles, but if you like things on the savoury side, this may be a better choice.

Overall, we really enjoyed the food at Yundish. It wasn’t the best Yunnan food we’ve ever had (surprise surprise, it was better in China) but it was definitely enjoyable enough that we’d go back. If you’re a real connoisseur of Chinese cuisine you may not be as impressed as we were, but for foreigners, it was a great choice. If you like Vietnamese food, we recommend checking Yundish (or another Yunnan place of your choice) out and experiencing the way all fo these cuisines seem to blend into one cuisine.

Check out their full menu on their website.

What’s the vibe?

Clean, modern restaurant serving some nice Yunnan food. The customers were mostly local.

Worth it?

We think so. It’s not too expensive and the food was nice.

Would you go back?

Yes, although we’d also consider looking for new Yunnan restaurants in Taipei so that we can compare the food.

Last updated December 2019

Yundish (Zhongxiao branch)

Chinese Name: 云滇（忠孝店）

Hours: 11am – 10pm

Phone: 02 2711 6411